With my children gone for a few days, I vacuumed the considerable debris from the living room floor and then took my ream of a manuscript and laid it on the wood floor, in piles of chapters and scenes. I walked around, bent down, lifted a page, then sat on the floor and read. I was immersed in the territory of a novel-in-draft-writing. I wasn’t looking for a good sentence, a decent paragraph, a chapter with potential. Instead, I aimed to listen, to look down deep, and figure out what may lie at the dead-center of this book.

My laptop was shut; the clock turned to the wall. I determined not to answer the phone unless my girls called. I had a good three-inch stack of a draft, much likely to be discarded along the way, mere steps to get to the end. To listen and read so hard, to come at this work without prejudice or prejudgement is difficult at best. At last, I began to scribble, notes for characters, a possible plot-line arc, and then, at the end, I wrote one true word: hunger. The book is about hunger.

That was most of Sunday. I painted a few kitchen windows and weeded the garden.

In the early evening, my girls called. I left my basket half-filled with tomatoes, and leaned against the garden post, listening for the heart of their stories.

We are afraid of writing, even those of us who love it. And there are parts of it we hate. The necessary mess, the loss of control, its ability to betray us… how to feel at ease with all this? How just to let one’s work be?… The answers you want can come only from the work itself. It drives the spooks away.

–– Bonnie Friedman, Writing Past Dark

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About Brett Ann Stanciu

A writer and sugarmaker, Brett Ann lives with her two daughters in stony soil Vermont. Her novel HIDDEN VIEW was published by Green Writers Press in the fall of 2015.
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“With vivid and richly textured prose, Brett Ann Stanciu offers unsparing portraits of northern New England life well beyond sight of the ski lodges and postcard views. The work the land demands, the blood ties of family to the land, and to each other, the profound solitude that such hard-bitten lives thrusts upon the people, are here in true measure. A moving and evocative tale that will stay with you, Hidden View also provides one of the most compelling and honest rural woman’s viewpoint to come along in years. A novel of singular accomplishment.” – Jeffrey Lent

“Early in the book, I was swept by a certainty of truths in Hidden View: that Stanciu knew the bizarre and fragile construction that people’s self-deceptions can frame. And that she was telling, out in public, against all the rules, the heartbreaking story of far too many women I’ve known, at one time or another, who struggled to make their dreams come to reality in situations…. …(In Hidden View) the questions of loyalty to person, commitment to dreams, and betrayal of the helpless are as vivid as the flames in the sugarhouse, as sweet and dangerous as the hot boiling maple sap on its way to becoming valuable syrup. There’s so much truth in this book that at some point, it stops being “fiction” and stands instead as a portrait, layered, complex, and wise. The Vermont that we love, the farms that we treasure, the children we nurture are fully present.” – Kingdom Books, Beth Kanell

“Stanciu is a Vermonter’s ‬writer. Anyone who loves the landscape and language of Vermont will be ‬drawn into this story, but her writing holds a universal appeal, too, ‬and rings true with the language and landscape of the human heart and ‬mind as well. The characters in Hidden View are people you’re ‬going to think about, and care about, long after the book is read.” – Natalie Kinsey-Warnock, AS LONG AS THERE ARE MOUNTAINS

"Brett Stanciu writes with enviable poise and precision. Hidden View is a story that burrows deep and stays put. This is a powerful novel."
– Ben Hewitt, THE TOWN THAT FOOD SAVED and
HOME GROWN

"(Stanciu") combines her academic life with her agricultural life to write an enduring story… as rugged as the earth it is based on."
– Steve Pappas, The Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus, Vermont Sunday Magazine

"Stanciu is Vermont through and through. The same can be said of her first novel...”
– Seven Days

"Hidden View is pure authenticity. Every word rings true to this place and its people; I know; I've lived here for 45 years."
– David Budbill, JUDEVINE